Browsing by Author "Kara, Esen"

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An Analysis of Birds Without Wings in Terms of Turkish Nation-State Building Process
(2024) Mccallum, Ebru; Kara, Esen
The rise of nationalism in Europe in the late 19th century led to the collapse of big empires and establishment of smaller nation states. The Ottoman Empire was one of these great empires and it was replaced by Turkish nation-state in its remaining territory: Anatolia. The transition from a multi-ethnic and multi-faith social structure to one that aimed to create a uniformly Turkish and Muslim society necessitated some social engineering which relied heavily on the ideals of Westernization and a rejection of the Ottoman cultural heritage. This meant imagining the many aspects of the community of the new Turkish nation-state including the national identity, which aimed for homogenization. The Turkish nation was imagined to be Turkish speaking Muslim citizens of predominantly Turkish descent. Such an imagination meant excluding the elements of the society that did not fit. In his Birds without Wings, Louis de Bernieres takes his reader to an imaginary heavenly town on the Mediterranean coast of Anatolia with a diverse and harmonious population and shows how it experiences the era from World War 1 through the establishment of the Turkish nation state. The inhabitants of the town all experience the pain and suffering caused by the war in their own ways and the negative impacts of the greater world with its imperial wars and of Mustafa Kemal with his genius as a soldier and social engineer. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the insights Louis de Bernieres' Birds without Wings offers about the formation of the Turkish nation-state and the methods used to communicate these insights. Keywords: Nation-state formation, Turkish modernization, the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, homogenization, intercultural dialogue, multiculturalism
Crossing the Threshold of the City: Urban Refugees in Hector Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier
(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2020) Esen Kara; Kara, Esen
One of the few novels in contemporary American literature representing the 1992 Los Angeles uprising Hector Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier serves as a historical text providing insight into a tumultuous moment in American history. This article examines The Tattooed Soldier as a literary documentation of the pre-uprising period at a time of severe distress in the city. The depiction of the Los Angeles uprising at the end of the novel dramatically draws a parallel between the civil war in Guatemala and urban discord in the US with the violence reviving the traumatic memories of Central American refugees in the host country. The narrative framework gradually unravels the threads of an urban tension that has accumulated in the deeper layers of the city and finally erupts into the great burning. The documentation of a specific period before the uprising not only reveals the workings of spatial injustice in the city but also provides an alternative to the mainstream discourse that associates the Los Angeles riots with stereotypical images of African-Americans destroying public property. More importantly Tobar's representation of an urban everyday life that remains outside the official geometric city grid serves as a critical esthetic that contributes to the discourse of resistance among urban study scholars.
Dişil Kent Bilinci ve Bir Flanöz Romanı olarak Fosforlu Cevriye
(2023) Esen Kara; Kara, Esen
Bu makale Suat Derviş’in Fosforlu Cevriye (1968) romanında kadın bedeninin kentle diyaloğundan ortaya çıkan bir yazı estetiği kullanarak bir modern edebiyat kahramanı olan flanör/flanöz figürüne alternatif bir bakış açısı yarattığını ve bu sayede Türk edebiyatının modern/modernlik imgeleminde gerek biçim gerekse içerik açısından önemli bir yer tuttuğunu göstermeyi amaçlamaktadır. Derviş bu romanında bir flanöz figürü olarak Fosforlu Cevriye karakterini, Charles Baudelaire’in ve Walter Benjamin’in modernite üzerine yazdıkları metinlerde değindikleri şekilde kentin kıyısında ve eşiğin ötesinde yürüyen bir kadın olarak tasarlar. Fakat modern edebiyatta kendini yineleyen kentte yürüyen ayrıcalıklı beyaz erkek formülünden farklı olarak Cevriye sokak çocuğu seks işçisi ve kadın olarak kentte var olan ve kentin gerçek bilgisine sahip olan alternatif bir flanöz figürüdür. Karakterin deneyimleri anıları ve arzularıyla biçim alan roman mekanlarının her biri alternatif kent haritalarına dönüşür. Modern kentin heterojenliğinin ve bireyin tesadüflerle örülü gündelik hayatının romandaki izdüşümü olan bu öznel haritalar kentsel belleğin de harcını oluşturur. Dişil kent bilincinin merkezi kaydırılmış görme-görülme biçimleri sunduğu romanda geçirgen ve özgün bir kadın olarak kentte görünür olabilen Fosforlu Cevriye karakteri metnin sınırlarını aşarak dile kültüre ve hafızaya yerleşir.
Ecological imagination and women’s memory in the contemporary Turkish novel
(Routledge, 2025) Esen Kara; Kara, Esen
This essay will explore the use of ecological imagination in women’s writing as counter-memorial practice in the contemporary Turkish novel. In a growing body of work the search for a language and aesthetics of ecology serves both to subvert human-centric ideologies and to rewrite official history that aims to erase collective memories of ethnic conflicts and political injustice. Ecological imagination as the essay will argue serves as an alternative medium for remembering and transferring the untranslatable. In this context the essay will discuss the ways of rebuilding women’s memory in alliance with traumatized landscapes and non-human agencies. Sema Kaygusuz’s Every Fire You Tend (2009) and Ayşegül Devecioğlu’s Weeping Mountain Silent River (2007) the two novels explored in this essay are emblematic of the potential of literature to make catastrophic events representable through an ecological imagination as a challenge to prevailing patterns of historical conditions. The narrative styles of these texts bend official modes of history writing and traditional modes of testimonial writing as they draw upon the lived experiences memories and subjugated knowledge of female subjects. Reading these novels through the lens of ecology also contributes to women’s memory which in the context of Turkey has always been in a tense relationship with the conservative historical practices of the nation-state. © 2025 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.